"Running has made me feel the ultimate aliveness, and transcendence over body and mind, that nothing else has ever approached and that only another runner could understand."-Bernd Heinrich

Friday, February 15, 2008

Heartrates anyone???

After playing with a heartrate monitor for one of the first times I am begining to gather some data on myself. I am begining to wonder what others are getting for their own HR values.

1) I have run 3 trail ultras of 31-41 miles in length the last few weeks and seem to average a HR of 136-138bpm with a steady moderate effort the whole race but HR fell over the 5-7 hours from 140's to 120's.

2) with easy runs of 45min-1:45 around my neighborhood I have an ave HR of 128-138bpm depending on how easy I go. For me 130bpm is around 8:45 pace per mile

3) in a hilly 10k trail race I have readings of 159bpm ave and shooting in to the 170's on the up hills 145-150's on the downhills. This was pretty much a max effort for 46minutes.

4) And in track work of 1000m and mile repeats with full recoveries I tend to average 153-161bpm for the repeat. With values in the last 100m of the repeat of 164-170. These repeats were close to 6:00 mile pace or my current VO2 max pace according to Jack Daniels calculator using my recent 3:01 marathon. (That was a total all out, well paced effort).

Sprinting up a hill I have got my HR up to 183 (I had said 192 but looking at the data graph from Uwharrie that one point had to be an error...it jumped from 178 to 191and then back into the 170's immediately) spriniting the first hill in the CRC trail 10k I hit 183. I will do a test soon to more accurately find my current max HR. I remember now my max HR being lower than predicted when I was doing lab testing in 1997 to 2002 (old values were 181-190 for my max then...and a few years have passed). I am 33 years old, but understand the 220-age formula has a 12bpm standard deviation! So is notoriously off for the majority.

So what I want to do next week is a 2 mile time trial to find out my current true VO2 max fitness and what my HR is during this run.

What kind of values do you get???Book values below:Vo2max- % of max HR=95-98Lactate threshold- % of max HR 80-92Recovery easy run -% of max Hr should be less than 75%

I wore a HRM once. NO... Twice! And it said that my heart rate was, like, one hundred-something-something. I don't really remember. But I do remember that by the end of the run, the monitor strap thingy had slid down to my hips, and then my heart rate was 0.

I trust this has been informative.

(Sorry I don't have much to contribute here. But if you were to look through my training log for mentions of a HRM, the only thing you'd be LESS likely to find is speedword. Or, at least, that's how it would be if I kept a training log.)